I get angry when I drive. Very, very angry. Between the potholes, snow banks creeping onto already narrow roads, entrance lanes on the Northern State shorter than a parking spot, members of the 55-or-die club puttering along in the left lane and OH MY GOD WILL YOU GO ALREADY? HE’S CHANGING HIS TIRE! WHY DO YOU HAVE TO SLOW DOWN TO LOOK?!
One thing irks me more than all the rest. It starts with a “c” and ends with an “ell phone.” It’s always the same scenario, too: Spot a car up ahead causing problems. Maybe it’s holding up an entire lane or slowly careening into the shoulder. Get closer and see…what’s that? Is that…an arm raised up near the headrest? No. NO. Get a little closer…what’s giving off light onto that person’s face? It wouldn’t be an LCD screen would it? Pull up alongside and, well, there aren’t enough symbols to censor what comes out of my mouth.
I’m usually spot-on with the long-distance cell phone assessing, but lately I’ve been getting it wrong at an increasing frequency. I see the inexcusable driving and I see the floating LCD screen, but no arm up to the ear. I get closer, and…the screen looks like it’s hovering on the windshield. A little closer and…it’s…a…
A GPS.
Even I remember “the good ol’ days” when people didn’t need a monotone female voice to tell them where to turn left. Was there some sort of mandate that all roads be randomly renamed? Did the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration take down highway signs for recycling? It’s like all of a sudden in the past, let’s say two years, the driving population forgot what to do when a road forks: LEFT?! RIGHT?! WHAT DO I DO?!
But hey, this is 2010. Technology is an ocular implant away from being literally ingrained with man. I have no qualms with that and I embrace machines taking rudimentary tasks out of my hands. However, there’s a time and place for that; the time being any not spent piloting a vehicle and the place being any but a strip of dotted-lined asphalt.
Using a handheld phone while driving is illegal in NYS (and elsewhere) for a reason—it is incredibly dangerous and people are incapable of carrying a conversation and having full knowledge of their surroundings as they go whizzing by. So why is it OK to engage a GPS? It’s a large, LCD screen-covered device that rests at eye level and is ripe for causing distraction. And this is different from a cell phone because…
The touch screen? It’s just that—a touch screen. No buttons, meaning it is borderline-impossible to know what you’re doing with the device without staring directly at it. At that point, interacting with it is one of two extremes: It’s so unresponsive you have to tap with more force than required by an actual button, or it’s so sensitive that tapping a single letter on the on-screen keyboard inputs half the alphabet. In either scenario, it’s an interaction necessitating your vision and attention, and last time I checked those are things driving a car also necessitates.
The autonomy? Right, because I believe every time a driver needs to use their GPS, they kindly pull off the road and come to a complete stop before inputting an address. Just like everyone does with phone calls, right?
A 2009 study found that using a real-time updating GPS saves drivers an average of four days per year. Ignoring the fact that it was sponsored by navigation map-company NAVTEQ, what this study doesn’t take into account is the dangerous scenarios created by using a GPS. OK, they get drivers to their destination quicker. So would raising the speed limit to 150 mph and making every traffic light only display different shades of green.
Every few months or so we hear about a traveler who followed their GPS’s instructions to a “T,” even when it instructed them to continue forward, into a pond or onto train tracks or off a cliff. This is not progress. This is not taking rudimentary tasks out of my hands. I’m not saying the world should revert to atlases; I’m saying don’t let a machine replace your cognitive skills.
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I wonder if they could use Twitter to prove someone was using their phone while driving. Tweets can be geotagged, which attaches a location to them. The first time I read a headline like, “Cops Discover Driver Tweeted From Wantagh Parkway,”I will cry tears of joy.
